The installation of lessismore at the Swiss Pavilion is the result of a project developed with the students of the architecture curriculum on invitation of the city of Geneva, helping to position it as a city of culture and a sustainable city.
lessismore dialogues with the Swiss Pavilion both symbolically and architecturally: the more one consumes, the less food is available and the more packaging waste is produced.
The installation is divided into two parts. A wall-container of PET bottles that spreads at the foot of the towers of the Pavilion and three pilasters of aromatic plants, porous and shiny white ceramic vertical surfaces composed of Skyflor® elements, arranged on towers at varying heights. They symbolise the nature that regenerates to feed us when we have consumed the food it produces.
The PET water bottle has been chosen as a food icon. The project highlights the concept of the serial, which makes it possible to erase any individual approach and to focus on the effect of mass consumption, of repetitiveness, of the ordinary and the commonplace. Wall-container, where visitors can place their bottles in empty boxes, but also symbolises a supermarket wall-shelf where products are displayed with their often unnecessary packages.
The wall, made of recycled transparent plastic, was put together in a workshop at HEPIA by some forty students for two weeks and assembled in front of the towers of the Swiss Pavilion in two nights by a team of six people. It is composed of 20 modules of approximately 200 cm height and 80 cm width, installed on concrete bases, mechanically fixed and fully removable. The PET plates were dry interlaced horizontally and vertically to form hundreds of boxes that can accommodate 50 cl water bottles. About 4500 bottles were used to pre-fill part of the boxes and thus reveal the amount of water that the wall could have contained and the volume of packaging waste that this leads to: 2552 l = 16 m3.
Winning Project - students: Rémy Brogniart, Sébastien Perrin, Axel Rabassa
In collaboration with HEPIA: Prof. Pierre-Andé Dupraz, manager of the Civil Engineering curriculum / Kevin Silva, assistant HES Civil Engineering.
Client: City of Geneva, Department of Culture - Partner Swiss Pavilion
Sponsors: Notz plastics AG / Clora Lighting / Prelco / Serbeco / Edmond Baud SA
Project partner(s)
Project leader - team
Paola Tosolini
(HEPIA)